THE MAN WHO SAW TOMORROW
dir. Robert Guenette, 1981
USA. 88 min.
In English.

In the early 1980s, before the era of Ancient Aliens and Beyond Belief, Orson Welles hosted this HBO “documentary” special about the life of Michel de Nostradame— aka Nostradamus— the 16th-century French apothecary and reputed seer whose “prophecies” “many” “experts” portend to have come true. Whether or not Nostradamus’ hundreds of vaguely provocative four-line poems were truly prophetic of future events (they weren’t) is still up for debate (it isn’t), but one thing he couldn’t predict is that this cable TV oddity would live a healthy second life on the 90s VHS market.

Much of the film’s lasting popularity has to do with Welles, who’s star power greatly outshines the material. Welles truly makes a meal out of his hosting duties, filling his oak-paneled library with a thick haze of cigar smoke as he struts around in an all-black ruffled suit. He alternates between skepticism and suggestion with aplomb, delivering lines like, “Was it coincidence… Or prophecy?”; ”Was he a QUACK… Or was he a true PROPHET?” with such unwarranted bravado that one wonders if he’s actually starting to enjoy himself. This is, after all, the same person who gave us F FORFAKE, whose influence is felt in Robert Guenette’s dramatizations of Nostradamus’ predictions.